Embodiments relate to personal finance, and more particularly, to preparation of electronic files such as tax returns and receipt summaries utilizing a financial management system.
Financial management systems such as tax preparation applications or programs including TURBO TAX and TAX CUT have become very popular and allow users to prepare and file a tax return using a computer. Other financial management systems such as transaction or receipt management or tracking applications or programs including QUICKRECEIPTS, QUICKEN, FINANCEWORKS and Mint.com have also become very popular and allow users to enter, receive or import transaction or receipt data using a computer and view, categorize and manage receipt or transaction data and receipt or spending summaries. TURBO TAX, QUICKRECEIPTS, QUICKEN and FINANCEWORKS are registered trademarks of Intuit Inc., Mountain View, Calif., and further details regarding these products are provided in http://myquickreceipts.intuit.com, http://turbotax.intuit.com, http://mint.com, https://quicken.intuit.com, and U.S. application Ser. No. 12/609,922, filed Oct. 30, 2009, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference as though set forth in full.
During use of a tax preparation application such as TURBO TAX, for example, the tax preparation application presents tax questions or data entry fields to the user as a series of interview pages or screens. In response, the user enters appropriate data or answers, and when the tax return has been completed, the tax return in electronic form may be electronically filed with a tax authority or printed and filed by mail.
For example, certain interview screens, fillable forms or questions may relate to personal and family matters such as the user's marital status, number of dependents, medical expenses, etc. Other interview screens, forms and questions may relate the user's finances as provided in Form-W2. As shown in FIG. 1A, Form W-2 10 includes various types of data including an employee's social security number, employer identification, employer name and address, employee name and address, and Boxes 1-20 for financial data such as wages, federal income tax withheld, social security wages, social security tax withheld, Medicare wages, Medicare tax withheld, types of retirement plans and retirement plan contributions, and state wage and tax data. One manner of preparing a tax return involves manually entering data of Form W-2 10 into respective data entry fields 14 of respective interview screens 12 as shown in FIG. 1B, which illustrates an interview screen 12 with fields 14 for data of Boxes 1-12A of Form W-2.
Referring to FIGS. 1C-D, during use of a receipt management or tracking application or program such as QUICKRECEIPTS, for example, the receipt management application receives or imports transaction data from merchants or retailers or data entered by a user or consumer, generates an interface or receipt summary 20 in which receipts are represented as respective discrete objects or icons 22, and when these icons 22 are selected, users can view additional item-level details 24 about a particular purchase or a specific item. Additional item-level data 24 displayed may include, merchant name, address and contact information, point of sale identifier, cashier identification, store number, date/time, item identification, price, tax, any discount, total amount paid, type of tender, reward or membership number, return policy. A link to a merchant website (e.g., sears.com) can be accessed through one-dimensional bar-code 26 to allow consumer to access merchant website from within an electronic representation of a receipt.
While financial management systems such as tax preparation applications and receipt management applications have greatly simplified preparation of electronic documents such as tax returns and receipt or spending summaries, they nevertheless involve substantial time due to navigating screens or pages and entering tax and transaction data if not automatically imported. In order to address these issues, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been utilized to try to simply preparation of electronic documents by reducing the amount of data that is manually entered. With OCR, an image of data such as Form W-2 data is acquired and analyzed by an OCR algorithm, which then imports recognized data into corresponding data entry fields of interview screens. However, there are a number of shortcomings associated with OCR.
For example, using electronic tax returns as an example, OCR may result in inaccurate importation of tax data into respective data fields due to inconsistencies encountered during image capture such as camera quality, lighting, paper condition, print quality (e.g., light printing, smearing, smudges, etc.). Further complications may arise as a result of employers or payroll providers generating Form W-2 or other tax forms with different or inconsistent formats. In these cases, the OCR algorithm may be configured to detect data presented in W-2 forms of a particular format and may not be able to identify certain W-2 data, thereby causing the OCR algorithm to import incorrect or possibly import no data.
Consequently, known OCR systems and methods, while providing some degree of improvement over manual data entry in certain cases, are nevertheless susceptible to factors that negatively impact the ability to accurately read and import data into electronic files, particularly when employers or payroll processors utilize different Form W-2 formats or when merchants utilize different receipt formats.